When the right to buy your council home was introduced in 1980, it was heralded as the "property-owning democracy" coming to fruition. In a prime example of how much political rhetoric now has the ring of a Homebase catalogue, David Cameron proclaimed last week that the policy's revival would buy electors their first "vital rung on the property ladder". Democracy doesn't come into it when it's every man for himself.

Such a toehold is now "vital" to those without one, only because those who are caught between the council waiting list and the private rental market know that without it they, and their families, may spend a lifetime in insecure and inadequate housing. Rather than creating "stable mixed communities", among other such claims made by the prime minister of the new scheme, surely being on a ladder requires always being prepared to move?

It's true that in some areas with a high proportion of ex-council housing, most of those who exercised the right to buy have stayed. In other areas, many right-to-buy beneficiaries have sold to private landlords seeking cheaper buy-to-let properties. In yet other places where housing need is greatest, such as inner London, councils are leasing back their old properties, at open market rates, from those private landlords in order to house the statutorily homeless.

Restoring the right to buy as a headline coalition policy allows Cameron yet again to reiterate the favoured phrases of all the main parties: "families" who "work hard" and "play by the rules". Respectable people, in other words, keen to retrieve a sense of order in what they perceive to be a time of disordered, disrupted, values. Although upgrading the right to buy is not currently part of Labour's housing policy – being redrawn as we speak – Ed Miliband's repeated appeals to "hard-working families" come from the same cribsheet.

This is, then, nakedly political rather than pragmatic in the old one-nation Tory sense. It seeks not to unite the country through fairer access to good housing, but to divide it through a relentless focus on home ownership. It bolsters the barrier between those who are deemed mortgage-worthy and those who aren't, and places the now-mortgaged in a more vulnerable position than those whose tenancy gives them security.

Even once you've factored in Cameron's bung, there are still major disadvantages to buying your home from the local authority. If you live in a flat, you're liable as a new leaseholder to pay a proportion of major works bills, often running into tens of thousands of pounds, when the need for communal improvements arises.

As a tenant in a now highly targeted social housing stock, statistically you'll be more likely than an existing homeowner to be in less secure work, at a time when the lowest paid and the least skilled are the most vulnerable to redundancy. Right-to-buy owners have also been more likely to fall into arrears and to have their homes repossessed, leaving them, in an awful irony, in need of emergency council housing.

Furthermore, the right to buy tends to siphon family houses in preferred areas from the stock that's left, leaving flats and less-favoured houses for those on the waiting list. The new right-to-buy rules will, unlike the original scheme, permit councils to keep the receipts of any sales they make to plough back into replenishing the stock, but in practice, councils with prime land values, such as inner London boroughs, won't make enough back to replace them.

I can't help thinking this is another case of two-tierism, in which the already comfortable attempt to persuade those aspiring to a more comfortable life that the tools to do so are in their hands. In reality, schemes such as Homebuy, where you are loaned a deposit and are therefore doubly indebted, and the right to buy, where you are sold the home in which you are already securely accommodated, are economic injustice made manifest.

Not only that, the real solutions to current problems – more housebuilding, greater regulation of the private rental market, the prevention of South Sea-style property bubbles, and above all, better-paid and more secure work for everyone – can be buried for another day under the emancipatory rhetoric of helping individuals and their families to "live the dream". In that sense, the £75,000 discount isn't so much a bribe as an advance on future losses.

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